What is Dredge?
Magic, the way Richard Garfield intended it to be! Unleashed upon Magic players in the Ravnica block, Dredge changed the game of Magic forever. Players were no longer dependent on tapping lands to cast creatures and spells to win the “fair” way. Dredge allows a player to leverage powerful spells and interactions with their graveyard, resulting in some of the most degenerate gameplay sequences in all of Magic.
“Dredge is one of my mechanics. I’ll be honest, I have a soft spot for it. I like things that attack the game from a very different vantage point. That said, it’s one of the most broken mechanics we’ve ever made, so I have no expectation that we’ll ever see it again.“
-Mark Rosewater
Dredge is a recursion mechanic, where the owner of a card in a graveyard with Dredge can return the card to their hand by choosing to skip their draw and mill a number of cards. That number appears beside the keyword for each card with dredge. Dredge only appears on green and/or black cards with the exception of the land Dakmor Salvage from the Future Sight keyword land cycle and the card Shenanigans from Modern Horizons.
While the reminder text on cards with the Dredge mechanic says “If you would draw a card, instead you may put exactly N cards from the top of your library into your graveyard. If you do, return this card from your graveyard to your hand. Otherwise, draw a card.” since the introduction of the Mill keyword in Core Set 2021, the dredge reminder text keyword was updated to use “mill”.
The Dredge.life website is dedicated to the degeneracy that is Dredge and even some of the decks that while they aren’t purely dredge, are inspired by or are closely related to the Dredge archetype.
702.51. Dredge
702.51a Dredge is a static ability that functions only while the card with dredge is in a player’s graveyard. “Dredge N” means “As long as you have at least N cards in your library, if you would draw a card, you may instead mill N cards and return this card from your graveyard to your hand.”
702.51b A player with fewer cards in their library than the number required by a dredge ability can’t mill any of them this way.